If you had to sum up English cricket in a phrase, what would you say? Energetically fraught, perhaps. Fretfully stoic. Buffed with a marketers shammy cloth. Expanding rapidly in all sorts of contradictory directions – as demonstrated by the drive to become the best in the world at something (ie Test cricket) at the precise moment everyone else finally stops taking it seriously, like a cartel of late-Victorian entrepreneurs ploughing their fortunes into long-term-urchin-chimney-sweep futures and 1,000-year colonial-oppression bonds.

This summer the recurrent theme isn't so much a mood as a condition. Sozzled and frazzled: blitzed and bombed. English cricket seems to be incredibly drunk. More consistently drunk as a group, and more profoundly drunk on an individual basis than ever before. Our cricket is cock-eyed. It is woozy. It is wankered. How did this happen?

One thing is clear. Like the downward gurgle of a champagne-glass pyramid, this is a tide that flows from the top. During the current Twenty20 season, Lord's itself is being advertised as "the best beer garden in London". There is some truth in this, but the question remains: should Lord's really be seeking beer garden status so eagerly? The Saturday of Sri Lanka's Test felt like a watershed moment for this sense of managed pubification. The ground was packed. The weather was fine. What unfurled from morning through to the whirling pits of the closing overs was a majestic tableau of mass, highly-organised public inebriation.

To recreate the scene, imagine the aftermath of the battle of Maldon restaged on the nursery ground's sodden and sticky turf: entire divisions of genial, man-shorted, smartphone-braying figures roiling giddily from bench to grass, many already on their knees, others entirely capsized. And not only the punters: TV's Angular Ex-England Fast Bowler Punditry Eminence could be seen holding court in raddled picnic pose, a tiny plastic Viking hat on his head. Nearby, at least one Hulking Retired Folk Hero All-Rounder loomed in mute stupefaction at the VIP bar, rakishly sunglassed, cigarette lolling, groupie-mobbed by name-badged high-rollers.

This is in part a logical response to the fact there are bars everywhere: the thronged lager counter with its squirts of whippy-foamed plastic fizz. The spiffily-tented champagne hut. And the Pimm's counter, dispensing not so much a drink as a lifestyle statement, that statement being: I am willing to pay £30 for some cucumber and half a jug of ice. With its refineries at peak production, at times during the afternoon Lord's seemed transformed into a vast urine-conversion plant or alcohol-extraction facility, some thickly-creatured rain-forest photosynthesising high-priced drunkenness into the London skies.

It might seem odd in this context but, despite a long and proud tradition of crowd inebriation, cricket isn't really much of a drinker's game. In fact, when you're drunk it becomes largely incomprehensible. Test cricket is a game of diffuse textural shifts, of finely etched miniature combat whereas the natural state of the lager drinker is a glazed and sated jollity, the entire world smudged with a tongue-frazzling yellow sheen. Watching cricket in this state you feel a bit like an American, or a toddler, or someone's press-ganged girlfriend: wreathed in mute bafflement, surprised by applause, wrenching your neck round to shriek "eh?" or "what?" every time the ball is hurled skyward or a bat waggled in triumph.

In fact, cricket has always been more of a food sport. As the journalist Tunku Varadarjan wrote, "a poorly assembled lunch can ruin a day at the Test match", and the history of cricketing packed lunches is keenly cherished (ideally cricket food comes in small shareable parts: the oozing sandwich slow-cooked in its tinfoil, the flaking samosa, the impossible joy of crisps). It is rather football that has its roots in booze, not only with its founding links to breweries but because, unlike cricket, football actually makes more sense when you're drunk. Drunk, the patterns reveal themselves, the music of the spheres begins to sing. I believe that a drunk football manager, backed by an entirely drunk coaching staff, would be invincible.

It isn't hard to see where cricket's new booze has come from. The simple answer is convenience. Twenty20 cricket has single-handedly upped the bar count. We have the tools. There is now no excuse for sobriety. But mainly it is the urge behind Twenty20, decision cricket reached in the 2000s that the game was simply a machine for raking cash, and that not optimising a revenue stream was somehow a sin against money itself. Hunched within its floodlit new-build, English cricket is now surfing the finest margins, dependent on the grande bouffe of the Saturday spree merchant, and not so much in bed with the purveyors of walk-up hospitality as sweatily intertwined on the main stairs.

Test cricket's enduring success in this country has become bound up with this strand of the leisure industry. At Lord's I kept thinking how strange it must feel for Sri Lanka, playing a game that draws empty seats back home, but here in London's Greatest Beer Garden inspires a full house of the often insensible, the beer-goggled, the bladder-swollen, the game's faithful backbone lolling dutifully in their high-priced seats, all doing their bit for English cricket's new economy of the sozzled.